Who We Must
by Reincarnated Poet
Summary: The first time Abby Griffin saw her daughter again, they were walking through a forest, and in that moment, she wasn't sure she knew Clarke Griffin anymore. She's no longer sure she has the strength to be who she must. Oneshot. Bellarke if you squint.
1. Chapter 1

AN: I know nothing of the books that the 100 is based upon, but I had this little nugget of a piece in the back of my mind. I hope you enjoy.

Who We Must

The first time Abby saw her daughter, she was walking through the forest. The physician had been walking for days with the rest of those that survived the fall of ARC station. It had been months since they'd found the drop ship and the wreckage around it. The bodies had made them lose hope for a time, but it was Kane-infuriating, damned, blessed Kane-who first asked her why there were so many bones.

Too many, and never before had Abby been more grateful to count skulls.

Nearly two hundred, and so the dead couldn't have just been the massacred children, so they had started looking for survivors. They'd been looking for months before they'd come across Lincoln and Octavia, the first survivor and the bearer of news. A news that Clarke was alive last time the girl had seen her. Lincoln had suggested that the Mountain Men had taken their children, and the remaining parents-a scarce thirty people-had reacted violently.

There had been voices of reason-Lincoln and Kane, who hated that they saw eye to eye but had to agree-but in the end, they had agreed. Octavia's doe eyes had swayed his heart, and Abby had only to fix Kane with a look from across a campfire. It had been three days, and Lincoln cautioned that they should have run into the perimeter guards of Mount Weather, but there had been no such resistance.

None at all, really, and when Abby saw her, she thought maybe she'd fallen asleep walking. Because that had to be a dream. Clarke had never looked like that, with her hair dirty and curling, face smudged with blood and dirt. Her clothes were clinical but filthy, caked in blood and mud and something that was too dark to be dirt. Those things, Abby could have looked past. It was the rest, the other things that her mind could not reconcile. The semi-automatic slung across her shoulders. The hard line to her mouth and the way she walked out front of the rest as they came like a wave through the trees.

They did not react at first, but Lincoln had kept them well hidden, so Abby wondered if they even knew they were there. Abby watched, frozen, as another, a tall young man with broad shoulders and a matching gun, walked beside her.

"Bellamy!" Octavia shouted, and in the next moment, the girl was shooting past her and Kane and into the slack arms of the young man. He stood, shocked and wide-eyed a moment before crushing her to his chest. A mousy boy latched onto the pair of them, and Abby was shocked when both a small and big hand clutched him a moment before the girl latched onto him.

"Monty?" Ah Lam Green had said, voice quiet and unsure, but her husband had repeated their son's name with more strength. In a moment, a young man was wrapped between them and more parents were surging forward, trying to find their children amongst those that survived. Clarke was gone then, pushed to the back of their group, and Abby stood there, still and staring at the memory of the image of a woman that she could no longer recognize.

"You saw her?" Kane asked beside her, and Abby nodded.

"That's Clarke," Abby murmured. "But it's not Clarke."

"Go find your daughter, Abby," Kane urged, and pushed her forward. It was all the catalyst that Abby needed, and in a moment, she was wading through those trying to find their children, those mourning the news of their death, and those who had given up trying to find their parents. When she finally found her, Clarke was standing some ten paces off with that young man, and both of them looked on like happy parents, proud and tired and so very relieved at having someone else babysit for a time. It was a look that no child should bare.

"Clarke?" Abby called, and she could see her shoulders tense. She did not turn toward Abby, but instead, she looked up at the young man, whose eyes found Abby's hard and unyielding. Fierce and protecting. He stepped in front of her in a gesture that was blatant and unconfuseable. "Clarke?" Abby called again.

"Princess?" the young man asked, and glanced over his shoulder as Clarke-Clarke, who could be more beautiful?-stepped around her.

"Mom?" Clarke asked, as if she didn't believe what was in front of her. "Bellamy, is that my mother?"

"Yeah, Princess, that's your mom," Bellamy confirmed, and that was all it took for that hard Clarke, the one that Abby could not recognize, to dissolve and be replaced with her daughter, running at her and burring herself into her chest.

"Shh...it's ok. It's ok." Abby heard the words, but her own mouth was pressed to Clarke's forehead. Clarke's was muttering something about a drop ship, and Abby only barely recognized the strength of another pair of arms holding them upright.

-Who We Must-

"No!" Abby shouted, throwing a bloody scalpel clear across the drop ship. It clattered to the ground with a definite sound. A finalized sound. A sound that matched the look on her daughter's face.

"You don't have a say," Clarke said firmly, and in that moment, Abby was forced to recognize the woman there-the real, honest to God woman-that her daughter had become.

"I'm your mother," Abby said, but the argument was weak. "I just got you back. I'm not going to let you go off again. Kane can go. He's our leader-"

"No, mom, he's your leader," Clarke paused, as if trying to measure her next words. Abby saw the tarp they'd hung up over the door flutter and the dark head of Bellamy Blake before her daughter continued. "We...we've been down here for months. You are...you're the Arc. We're grounders now. We had to live on our own. We had to...you don't get to send me to earth and then pull the mom card."

"I'm still your mother, on earth or on the Arc."

"And I'm still the co-leader of the 100. We will not be locked up again. Just because you're here now? That doesn't mean you all get to stay if you keep trying to take over. This isn't the Arc. There is no Queen Abby and King Jaha. Not down here."

"I...I'm not trying to take over, Cl-"

"You're in my med bay, you're using my supplies, and you kicked me out days ago," Clarke interrupted. "Kane keeps trying to change our guard rotations on the wall, and he's not doing it with your people, he's doing it with ours, and frankly, what's left of the 100 are sick of it." Clarke drew a long breath, a steadying breath, and for a moment, Abby felt like the child. "You abandoned us to die." Those blue eyes locked on her. "You sent us down as your test subjects. To burn up or get radiation poisoning, and you know what? A lot of us died."

"A lot of us died on the arc-"

"One of the first was a boy named Atom," Clarke said, but the fight was gone from her voice. "He got caught in the acid fog, which if you haven't seen that yet, doesn't kill you. It just burns your skin and your eyes and your lungs. It leaves you wimpering on the ground until you get eaten by one of the animals down here." She spoke with such a steady voice that Abby wondered for a moment if she was making it up. "He asked me to kill him, and looking at him...I couldn't find a reason to make him suffer. No one could have saved him from that, and he was a good guy, Mom. You sent a good kid down here to die slowly." Those sharp blue eyes crippled her. "At least on the Arc, you died quickly or peacefully. At least you sent the criminals down for murdering, right?"

"We did what-"

"You became who you had to be to survive," Bellamy cut in. "But so did we." Abby glared at him, but Clarke sent him a grateful look, turning toward him, that god forsaken gun slung across her shoulder.

Bellamy shifted his matching weapon to the opposite shoulder as he reached out a hand and took Clarke's. They left the dorp ship like that, and for the first time in her life, Abby Griffin wondered if she had the strength to be who she must.


	2. Chapter 2

AN: I promised someone a second part to Who We Must as a prize for The Big Damn Contest which was posted in Demon on a Lead and has now concluded. This was difficult to write, and honestly, I'm not sure if I like it still. Let me know what you think! In compliance with The Big Damn Contest, this is just an addition. This is still complete, and the only chapter that was requested to be added to this, per the rules of TBDC. This is also VERY Abby-centric.

**Who We Must - Part Two**

Abby Griffin simply did not have the physical strength to manage.

She had the strength to do a lot of things. She'd run a medical unit. She'd earned her way through education and politics to sit on the council. Despite the love in her heart, she had watched her husband stand on the other side of a plated airlock. Even now, on the ground, she'd held onto what was left of that strength for as long as she could.

She was tired. She was hurting. Most of all, she was alone.

Clarke sat not a hundred steps away from her, a smile on that familiar yet unfamiliar face, listening as one of the other Sky Box children told an animated story, gesturing with his hands and making an odd face. Abby imagined what he must be saying in those moments. They'd shared so many experiences together that it could have been anything. It was everything.

"It will get better." The soft voice beside her belonged to Marcus Kane, as all reassuring statements made at her originated over the past few days.

The sun glinted off of a semi-auto that swung on the young man's shoulder as he held his hands up to indicate a height above his head.

"No, Marcus," Abby said simply. "It will never get better."

"Abby-" She did not stay to hear his platitudes. She didn't have the strength to listen to them, let alone believe them, so she fled. She fled from Marcus's comforting hand at the small of her back. She fled from Clarke's self-sufficient lack of need of anything from her mother. She fled from the knowledge in all of the children's eyes.

Maybe most of all, Abby didn't have the strength to see where Clarke found hers.

She shook the idea from her mind, trying to dislodge the memories along with it. A strong jaw. Blonde and grey peppered stubble. Puppy dog eyes that just pouted up at her. A loose-lipped grin that never seemed to go away. Until he did.

She shuttered, breath hitching on a sob, and ducked under the low hanging branches of a pine tree, trying to lose herself in the smell of forest. Jake would have loved his place. He loved everything, but he'd have especially loved the smells. Abby hated those smells more than she hated anything else on the earth.

"Jake," she murmured as she leaned back against the rough bark of a tree, staring up at where the sunlight came through the canopy in a ghostly dance of light and particulates. "God, Jake, she's just like me."

It was the fear of every parent, unspoken but sharp in the back of their mind. Their children might repeat their mistakes. They might follow their footsteps so surely that they ended up in the same situation. Abby might have hated Bellamy Blake as much as she hated the smells.

Bellamy Blake and Jake Griffin were as opposite as two people could get, in the eyes of Abigail Griffin, but if she turned her head just right, distanced herself from her own aching chest and squinted...well, if they weren't the same god-damned person, Abby wasn't a physician.

Jake had been a strong man in far more than the physical sense.

Abby watched nearly every day as Bellamy Blake grew stronger.

Jake was the best of men.

Bellamy was changing.

Jake was the shine in Abby's soul.

Clarke looked at Bellamy with familiar eyes.

Jake was willing to believe in his people, protect them, lead them.

Bellamy had retrieved his people from as close to hell as earth became.

Abby hated Bellamy Blake because Clarke loved him. Her daughter might not know it yet, but it was clear in the way her eyes flickered over to the dark young man as if she could speak to him with no more than a glance or the quirk of his lips. He would be Clarke's breaking point, just like Jake was hers.

"Abby?"

"Go away, Marcus," Abby murmured, the words as clear and dry as her eyes. She should be crying. She should be aching at the knowledge that her daughter was going down the same dark pathway that she had so many years before.

"It gets better, Abby," he repeated himself. "I promise you, this gets better."

Abby felt him settling beside her, and for a moment, she wondered when she'd sat in the forest litter. Marcus's shoulder bumped hers lightly, and she let herself ease against him, if only just, because she had to borrow strength from somewhere.

"I don't know my own daughter," she said. "What's worse: I don't know if I'm strong enough to know her anymore."

"They've all changed," Marcus said. He had changed, too. Abby saw it in every line of his face. She saw it in the small tree that he'd made sure was seen safely to the earth. She saw it in the way his voice was soft instead of commanding. "But if they hadn't, we'd have never seen them alive."

"You don't know that." She drew a stuttering breath. "I hate this place for changing them."

"You think it was the earth?"

"Of course it was the earth." Marcus nodded at what she'd said, but the noise he made was non-committal.

"I think maybe it started when we put them in cells." Abby felt tears prickling her eyes at that. it was easier, she supposed, to think that this world had changed them all, had somehow reached into their hearts and hardened them against all those that had remained behind. Thinking that it was before, back when Abby was in control, where she had been responsible...

"I can't, Marcus," Abby said, but it was all she could manage before her voice broke, before she broke.

**-RP: Who We Must - Part Two-**

Clarke leaned forward, adjusting a piece of firewood as their small campfire popped and crackled down to a low glow in the night. She'd seen her mother and Marcus Kane come in just as the sun had started to go down, and Clarke had scowled at the way Abby leaned into Kane.

She'd let Monty's soft but animated voice pull her from her hurt and settled further with her back against the tree trunk they'd been using as a backrest. Bellamy had been warm against her right side then, Octavia at her left. She enjoyed the warmth that closeness brought them, but Bellamy and several others had long ago gone on night guard. Their group had lessened enough so that they no longer had to sit pressed against each other, and Clarke shivered.

"They keep staring at us," Octavia said, dark eyes flickering skittishly over Clarke's shoulder. The blonde knew who Octavia was talking about, but she'd been doing her best to ignore the weight of several gazes.

"Who can blame them?" Lincoln's deep voice was light with a joke, and Clarke thought that it was nearly sickening the way Octavia both blushed and elbowed him in the ribs.

"We aren't like them," Jasper said easily, glaring moodily at a group of three teens that sat around with other members of the Arc. Clarke couldn't help but agree. They were different. They'd been different the moment they'd been put in the Sky Box, but they'd been different species the second their feet had touched the earth.

"We might be again," she said. It was a lie, even to her own ears, but it painted a prettier future. A future where they might all live together, where they didn't fissure and crack until someone was forced to leave.

"They're good people," Lincoln offered. He and Octavia had been with them for longer than the rest, and he had a sense of respect for those that had volunteered so readily to go save their children. Unfortunately, that respect had flickered and died over the last few weeks. The remaining one hundred had taken it upon themselves to continue about their everyday tasks, oftentimes finding them more cumbersome with the added weight of those from the Arc.

Some tried. They truly did; even Clarke had to admit that. They were just new, fresh-faced, and used to Arc learning, where things could take time and were not urgent. Others...well, Clarke had put Bellamy's shoulder back together after one of the others hadn't tried so hard during a hunt. The stag had lunged forward instead of turning to run, and the man had fled, leaving Bellamy with his shiv and nothing else. The stag had bled out into the dirt, but when they returned, Bellamy had gripped Clarke's shoulder with his left hand instead of his right, and tugged her along to the drop ship.

He'd been covered in blood, and it took her a few-embarrassingly long-moments, to realize that it was not all from the deer. He was good natured about it, ribbing her for staring at his chest as she took in the site of a broken tine protruding from his shoulder. He'd forgiven the man quickly. Clarke still asked Miller to go with any of their own on hunting trips if Arc survivors were involved.

"I'm sick of being their sideshow," Jasper muttered darkly, drawing Clarke from her memories.

"It'll pass. They're just not sure where they fit in yet."

"They don't know?" Jasper asked, voice rising. "I'm sorry. I got shoved into a cell, drug out of it and dropped into possibly radiation soaked ground. Since then I've been speared, gone through a war, and tortured by people who claimed to be civilized. I'd love to know what they went through to put them so off their ease."

Clarke shot him a dark look, and he settled quickly. He was still seething, she could tell, but at least he'd stopped shouting.

"We'll figure it out," Clarke promised.

"Yeah," Jasper said, offering her a small smile. "I need a piss."

"Gross," Octavia said, but her voice was light and teasing. Monty quickly agreed, slipping from the ground and ghosting his friend's steps as Jasper left them. Clarke tried to ignore the feeling of dis-ease in her bones. With just her, Octavia and Lincoln there, it made her edgy. Outnumbered and outsiders, yet again.

"You seen Finn?" Raven's voice startled the trio, and Clarke turned to give her a hesitant smile over her shoulder.

"Guard duty with Miller and Bellamy and three of Kane's." Clarke nearly snickered at that. It wasn't a match made in heaven, but they would come together long enough to deal with the incompetence of the Arc. Anymore, whenever any of them had to work with Arc survivors, they took Finn along. He was naturally more patient, and hell of a better teacher than Miller.

"He promised to take me out to see the glowing trees," Raven said, deflating slightly as she sat down in Jasper's place. Clarke couldn't blame the girl for being out of sorts. They'd had little time together to try to put their relationship back together. Finn hadn't been in the hell that had been Mount Weather, and that was a big enough gap between them without the Arc survivors taking up his good humor. Clarke had been pleased when the pair had started to try at a relationship again, more pleased that she'd expected, really.

Relationships hadn't seemed so important after Mount Weather. They were all family. All of them. Some of them happened to be paired up together. Others were simply free standing members of a group that would not be broken apart. Never again.

"I'll take you," Octavia offered, eyes bright. "Anything to get out of this camp."

"Be careful," Lincoln cautioned, but he let her rise and drag the mechanic off into the darkness. He stood only a few minutes later, a sigh escaping as he did.

"Following them?" Clarke asked. Lincoln simply shrugged one shoulder in a "What can you do?" gesture. He walked off into the darkness, and Clarke shivered against the chill of the night. Alone beside the dying fire, she felt more alone than she had since Mount Weather.

**-RP: Who We Must - Part Two-**

Bellamy was cornered by Abby Griffin early after his overnight guard shift. He was tired, grumpy and sore from standing at attention most of the night, and the grim faced physician demanding his presence was doing nothing for his mood.

Still, she was Clarke's mother, and Bellamy would do a lot to keep Clarke in his good graces, so he followed her through camp and into the drop ship, past Bellamy's own tent and Clarke's, only a few paces away.

"What can I do for you, Mrs. Griffin?" he asked as she stood there, glaring at him.

"You are not Jake," she said sternly, as if he was being scolded.

"My name is Bellamy," he said. For a moment, he thought she'd lost her mind, but there was a spark in her that was almost familiar.

"Stop trying to be like him. She's not going to become me. I can't let her become me." He was lost again, following a raving woman down a rabbit hole that seemed to twist off in six directions at once.

"I'm sorry but you've lost me," he offered, trying to offer peace.

"Clarke can't let you be her strength," Abby said. It made sense in that next moment. Perfect sense. Bellamy recalled the name Jake Griffin from his childhood and vaguely from stories Clarke told about her own incarceration. Jake Griffin had been the one to discover the oxygen crisis, had been Clarke's father, and had been everything that Clarke had looked up to since. He'd also been Abby's husband, and apparently, she saw him in Bellamy.

Even as it fit into place, it enraged him. Clarke Griffin was her father's daughter more than she was her mother's.

"Clarke gets her strength from herself," he said, trying to keep the annoyance from his tone and failing. "Don't put your own shortcomings on your daughter."

"I've seen the way-"

"She's Jake Griffin in this, Abby; I'm you," he spat the last word, as if the idea that he was similar to her made him ill. The comparison silenced her in a moment, and he was out the door, storming from the drop ship and into his tent.

Annoyed and tired, he threw himself down onto his pallet. He willed sleep to come quickly, but the zipper on his tent jingled and the slow drag promised a different end. He groaned and threw his hand across his eyes.

"Go away, Abby," he muttered.

"I'm not my father." The voice was firm but amused, and Bellamy peaked out from under his wrist to glance at Clarke who had ducked under the flap of his tent. There was a little smile at the corner of her mouth, one that spoke trouble. "But if you want to be my mother, I'll ask her about some nice dresses. I think we can work with your hair to-"

The yelp that she made as he lunged toward her was sharp and child-like. The giggles that followed were caught somewhere between a woman and a girl. He wrestled her around, twisting and tickling, trying to escape the sharp elbows and knees.

He abandoned tickling and ruffled her hair as he had Octavia's as a child. His sister usually struggled though. Clarke simply sat there, staring up at him through the blonde tangles, unimpressed.

"Dresses," he huffed, releasing her to comb her own hair with her fingers. They sat in silence for a few minutes, him pretending to be angry and her that she wasn't seriously considering the words she'd eavesdropped.

"She's right," Clarke said after a long, comfortable silence. Bellamy groaned and collapsed back against his pallet. He didn't have time for the- "You give me strength." He looked down the plain of his chest at her as she fought with the tangles. She was studiously avoiding his gaze, so it was no surprise when she jumped as his fingers started diligently undoing the evil they had done in her hair.

"We give each other strength," he said, offering a countering situation. She seemed to accept that with a hum. He kept up working the knots from her hair, and when they were gone, he pulled her hair back from her face, braiding it back and out of the way if only because he was enjoying the feel of her hair between his fingers.

"You sure, because you're pretty good with the hair thing already, and I think-" She didn't get to finish the statement.

Later, Bellamy would be willing to admit that he had braided her hair-he had a younger sister, afterall-if only because she had to be willing to admit to what came after. If Abby Griffin didn't have the strength to watch them sitting side by side, Clarke pressed against his ribs and under his arm, then Bellamy didn't much care.


End file.
